Except I’m not really here any more. Come and visit my new pad instead.
Yep, I’m hosting my own site now; this blog isn’t going to get updated any more. The new site is http://www.elaptics.co.uk
See you there soon!
Hey, you found me.
June 9, 2008A dubious first!
July 28, 2006Well apparently I can claim a first – for being spammed through ma.gnolia! Yes, apparently nowhere is safe from spam now.
Today I received a message within ma.gnolia (the really nice bookmarking website, for those of you who don’t know) from member donco. I’ve posted a screenshot of the message for posterity. 
An a related note, I’m in the closing stages of putting together a widget for Mac OS X Tiger to quickly search just your own ma.gnolia bookmarks. When it’s done I’ll put it on my website for download and maybe see if I can get it listed on ma.gnolia itself. Speaking of websites, I’m also just getting my actual site up (www.elaptics.co.uk) if you want to see it in it’s current part-finished state. And that’s my rubbish excuse for not keeping this blog up to date!
.ds_store no more (on network shares at least!)
April 26, 2006Nothing exciting (for most people) but I’ve just finally found an easy way to stop creating the useless .ds_store files on non-mac network shares so I’m putting the info here for my posterity.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301711
1. Open the Terminal.
2. Type:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
3. Press Return.
4. Restart the computer.
As found on www.textsnippets.com (which also may come in handy in the future)
[composed and posted with ecto]
Easier editing of TypoScript
April 8, 2006UPDATE: August 2008
I’ve moved my blog to http://www.elaptics.co.uk and the TYPO3 bundle is now in the Macromates Subversion repository. You can find more information here http://www.elaptics.co.uk/projects/
I’ve recently discovered TextMate from www.macromates.com – a superb text editor, previously I’ve been using TextWrangler but I’m slowly using TextMate more and more, one of it’s really great features is it’s expandability through the use of bundles.
In getting to grips with the bundle editor I decided to put together a bundle for editing TypoScript so that it has syntax highlighting plus I’ve added some of the more common TypoScript objects as snippets to make it much quicker to put your typoscript together. I’ve put a link to the TSRef doc online as well as ensuring the comment toggle puts the right comment symbol in.
Not sure how it measures up as a first attempt but drop me a line if you find it useful or would like to see some other things added to it, likewise if you add any more features why not send them to me so I can include them here. If enough people are finding it useful then we can also consider getting the bundle added to the main repository at macromates.
You can download the bundle here.
I’ve added the following scope selectors to the language grammars which you’ll almost certainly want to add to your theme to have the syntax highlighted. (Whether these are the best scopes to use I don’t know but feel free to suggest others).
entity.other.tsobject
entity.other.tsconstant
entity.other.tsvalue
entity.other.tscopy
PC World ahead of the curve?
March 27, 2006Well looks like PC World have managed to pull off a bit of a coup – but they’re keeping it a bit quiet. Whilst some have managed to get Windows XP running on the new Intel based Mac’s, PC World have managed to get Mac OS X running on non Apple based kit – at least if their new advert in the UK is anything to go by! The advert I saw on E4 last night shows the PC World website running on the Compaq notebook PC. Their web browser of choice? Apple’s Safari browser! 🙂 Well at least now they’re admitting OS X is a better operating system to run!! 🙂
[composed and posted with ecto]
Technorati Tags: mac
Is this me?
March 14, 2006Ok, I just read this article TidBITS: From iPod to MacBook Pro: A Switcher’s Tale and it pretty much sounds like me and my view on the whole switching to Apple thing.
I’m not a total mac zealot but I do think that if you’ve thought about switching (and even if you haven’t), get yourself down to an Apple store or a reseller for Apple and have a go on one. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. One tip though; forget about Windows and how you have to do things, on the mac if you’re not sure how to do something try the really obvious thing and it usually works exactly like you’d expect.
Technorati Tags: mac
Secret GMail account
March 13, 2006Wow, another week has flown by, nothing great to report other than I’ve found another rss news reader which I’m trying out. (Endo for anyone who’s interested) plus I’m also trying out WordPress to see the differences between that and Blogger.
Ok, the real reason for this post is just to note that I found out today that anyone who has a googlemail.com account with Google can still claim they have a gmail.com address and use it. I’m sure this isn’t secret at all (all I did was notice the headers of some mails sent to me through googlemail) but it’s good to know, googlemail just doesn’t have the same ring to it as gmail. Maybe, at some point we’ll lose the ability (if Google loses it’s legal battle) but for now it works.
Technorati Tags: endo, googlemail, puppy
Titles are the hardest thing to write!
March 4, 2006Well another week has shot by, haven’t really done much this week but suffice to say that I’ve been playing around with more apps again and been trying out various RSS readers to see if I can find one I like. At this stage I’m still not sure, I’m torn between Newsfire and NetNewsWire, what I really want is a mix of the two….
Also, I think I’ve decided to forget del.icio.us for now, I’ve found ma.gnolia.com instead which I think I prefer. It was certainly very easy to get bookmarks into it as opposed to del.icio.us where I have to find some other program to do the import. It’s also much nicer to look at, although sometimes it seems a little sluggish. It also has some nice features that del.icio.us doesn’t have, but it’s early days and I’m fickle so maybe by next week I’ll have found another one 🙂
My new website at www.elaptics.co.uk is coming along, I’ve got the main template up and running and I’ve decided to use TYPO3 4beta as a bit of an excuse to test it. I’ve had a few problems which I’m still working through, it looks like many extensions are going to need some alterations to work satisfactorily in version 4 at this point though.
[composed and posted with ecto]
More Reviews
February 25, 2006Well as promised I said I would say a little more about the various apps I’ve found recently. I should note that I’m a mac user so these are all either mac specific or are web applications – so Windows users, go and get yourself a better computer 🙂
ecto – Ok, I haven’t done too much with this yet but it’s really easy to use and looks like it has some nice handy features, set up and getting started was no problem whatsoever and I definitely prefer just being able to leave this running and quickly jot a note down in it for adding to later on. The ectoize shortcut/bookmark for the browser’s also seems a handy feature although I haven’t actually used it yet but it’s still early days. Maybe this is another review I should come back to in another couple of weeks but I guess the real proof will be whether I think it’s worth purchasing to continue using after the trial period is over. By the way Windows users, if you’re still reading this, ecto is available for your platform too.
High Priority – I found this app by reading Douglas Bowman’s blog at Stopdesign | Mac app: High Priority and I had the same problem, I like to make notes of things to do but I’d never found anything that quite did what I wanted, I thought iCal was it but if I didn’t have it running (more often than not) then I would forget about it and jot things down on paper again. But I think this is IT. It’s well worth the whole $6/£3.50 asking price. The only one feature that I think is missing is having some kind of date picker for setting the due date on a new or edited item.
On another note remind me not to buy Smackdown vs Raw 2006 for the PSP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH3dc7IZVPc&search=psp%20load%20time
[composed and posted with ecto]
Playing with stuff
February 22, 2006PSP Video
Been playing with various things the last few days, mainly trying to get video’s onto my PSP. It’s been more of a pain than it ought to be. 1. There’s not so many programs for the mac to make it as simple as it ought to be. The few that I found were a. more expensive than free and not as good as mac apps should be. Finally found one that seems to get it in the right format without much hassle but it looks like it’s early in it’s development because you can only do one file at a time, so a queuing feature would be nice. Otherwise it does a good job as well as being free. You can find it here ffmpegX a DVD, SVCD, VCD, CVD, VOB, DivX, XviD, H.264, PSP, iPod, MP4, MOV encoder for Mac OSX
It’s a real pain that you can’t just drop the files that most podcasts and the other video formats come in straight onto the PSP. The conversions take around 10 mins or more for 20 min video’s so you can’t just drop them on at a whim if you suddenly need to go out and you want to take the video’s with you.
I found that the best settings for the podcasts I get from iTunes are to use the PSP H.264 preset setting and then go and alter the video resolution to 320×240 unless it’s already a widescreen video. It’s also worth making sure it’s set to NTSC. Apparently PAL works on PSP’s with later firmware but when I re-encoded a video the audio was out with the video.
del.icio.us
In the course of getting this blog set up I’ve been reading a few blogs and come across various nifty apps (web and mac), some of which I’d seen before but not really considered as being of that great a benefit. Being in a webby mood I thought I’d give them a try. I’m pleasantly surprised with del.icio.us thus far, although I can’t actually access the site right now – I hope this is a one off and it’s not down too much otherwise it’s going to rapidly get binned. What’s the point of having all your bookmarks available on any computer if you can’t access them if the site’s down or too busy? And now it’s back up! 🙂
Maybe tomorrow I’ll add some more first thoughts on del.icio.us along with some of the other apps and utils I’ve found.
And please someone tell me why I’m listening to 80’s on iTunes??
[composed and posted with ecto]
Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, psp
elaptics.co.uk 